Mushroom Town: Oliver Onions Collections

Originally trained as a commercial artist, he worked as a designer of posters and books, and as a magazine illustrator during the Boer War. Encouraged by the American writer Gelett Burgess, Onions began writing fiction. The first editions of his novels were published with dust jackets bearing full-colour illustrations painted by Onions himself.

Poor Man's Tapestry (1946) and its prequel, Arras of Youth (1949) are about the adventures of a juggler, Robert Gandelyn, in the fourteenth century. Onions wrote two detective novels: A Case in Camera and In Accordance with the Evidence. Two of his works are science fiction novels:New Moon (1918) about a utopian Britain, and The Tower of Oblivion (1921), featuring a middle-aged man who recedes back to his youth. A Certain Man (1931), about a magical suit of clothes, and A Shilling to Spend (1965), about a self-perpetuating coin, are fantasy novels. Onions wrote several collections of ghost stories, of which the best known is Widdershins (1911). It includes the novella The Beckoning Fair One, widely regarded as one of the best in the genre of horror fiction, especially psychological horror. On the surface, this is a conventional haunted house story: an unsuccessful writer moves into rooms in an otherwise empty house, in the hope that isolation will help his failing creativity. His sensitivity and imagination are enhanced by his seclusion, but his art, his only friend and his sanity are all destroyed in the process. The story can be read as narrating the gradual possession of the protagonist by a mysterious and possessive feminine spirit, or as a realistic description of a psychotic outbreak culminating in catatonia and murder, told from the psychotic subject's point of view. The precise description of the slow disintegration of the protagonist's mind is terrifying in either case. Another theme, shared with others of Onions' stories, is a connection between creativity and insanity; in this view, the artist is in danger of withdrawing from the world altogether and losing himself in his creation. Another noted story from Widdershins is "Rooum", about an engineer pursued by a mysterious entity. "Phantas", "The Rosewood Door" and "The Rope in the Rafters" involve time shifts.

The title novella of The Painted Face (1929) is about a Greek girl who is the reincarnation of an ancient spirit; Ashley describes it as "one of the finest works in the genre". The collection also contains "The Master of the House", a story involving a werewolf and black magic.

A long supernatural novel is The Hand of Kornelius Voyt about an isolated boy who falls under the psychic influences of another.

Onions was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his 1946 novel Poor Man's Tapestry.